Citigroup's Court Square Two: Long Island City, Queens

2007

Aug

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I briefly mentioned CitiGroup’s Court Square Two project in Queens’ Long Island City back in May (after its construction manager Turner was honored along with USGBC at Solar One’s Green Building Gala) but want to pass along more details about the 14-story, 528,000 square foot building designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (with development manager Tishman Speyer) that’s aiming for LEED Silver. (The project's interiors are profiled in the August 2007 issue of New York Construction, which is not yet available online).

Court Square Two was designed as a podium structure, which will allow Citi to expand the building to a height of 38-stories at some point in the future, should it so choose. Turner is also managing the 490,000 square feet of interiors work, including 300,000 square feet of office space across ten floors. Most of the offices are on the perimeter of the building, but glass walls will allow natural light to penetrate deep into the cubicles on the interior of each floor. Citi hopes to reduce its water consumption by twenty percent (and save over 1 million gallons of water each year) thanks to the building’s graywater system, and its high-performance mechanical, electrical, and HVAC systems should reduce energy consumption by twelve percent over conventional construction. Seventy-five percent of construction waste was diverted from landfills.

Turner’s interiors work (which was designed by TPG Architecture (The Phillips Group) of New York) also involved a variety of sustainable elements, including high-efficiency lighting, eucalyptus wood paneling with low-VOC finishes, and formaldehyde-free wood doors. Citi plans to use the Court Square Two project as a prototype for all of its other projects, which it hopes will similarly achieve a LEED Silver rating. As you can see from the renderings (both with and without the potential expansion on top of the 14-story podium), Queens is about to add another architecturally impressive green building to its growing collection of sustainable structures. Citi hopes to open the $290 million project sometime this fall.